Deeplinks Blog posts about Digital Books

A federal district court in New York today issued a long-awaited ruling in the Google Books case, Authors Guild v. Google, rejecting the proposed settlement between the parties.

EFF participated in the case as counsel to a collection of authors and publishers, including Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and Cory Doctorow, who objected to the settlement based on concerns about reader privacy. EFF worked with the ACLU and the Samuelson Clinic at University of California at Berkeley on the objection.

Next time you fly Virgin America, you just might see one of EFF's new PSAs as part of your onboard entertainment. Earlier this year, EFF worked with Bucknell University Professor Eric Faden (of A Fair(y) Use Tale fame) to create these two video PSAs about important, cutting-edge digital rights issues!

In February, we published "Digital Books and Your Rights," a checklist for readers considering buying into the digital book marketplace. The folks behind the Ibis Reader ebook service have gone ahead and posted thoughtful answers to each question, inviting their users into an honest discussion about the features, policies, and practices around its software.

In our last post, we set out some of Google's numbers for the total number of books that would fall under the amended settlement agreement. Now let’s look at how many and what sorts of rightsholders have come forward as a result of the oft-criticized notice program conducted by Google and the plaintiffs. For starters:

Number of Books Google Says are Subject to the Settlement: About 10 million

In the wake of yesterday's fairness hearing on the Google Book Search settlement, this might be a good time, while Judge Chin is deliberating, to take a moment to update some of the numbers about the settlement. These numbers were culled from settlement documents (thanks to Prof. James Grimmelmann for much of that), Google's presentation at the fairness hearing, and congressional testimony.

[Note: these are Google's numbers and it wouldn't be surprising if others disputed them.]

First, how many books are there? Overall, Google engineer Dan Clancy said that Google's research indicates that there were over 174 million books total worldwide in bibliographic records.